What can Spring do to help me secure my application? — Audience This article is aimed at developers with a solid understanding of the basics of Spring and web security. It marries up the two concepts, concluding with a worked example of using Spring Security with Spring Boot. Argument Spring Security is centred round two core concepts: Authentication: Verifying you are who you…

An introduction to caching principles — Audience This article is aimed at developers with a reasonable understanding of how the internet functions, contemporary application architectures and AWS. It will cover what caching is in a more general sense, the motivation behind using it, and then deep dive into specific implementations. Argument A cache stores previously used or computed…

An introduction to Kinesis using Apache Camel and Spring Cloud Stream — Audience This article is aimed at developers with a reasonable understanding of Java and Spring, but no experience whatsoever with AWS Kinesis, Apache Camel or Spring Cloud Stream. It will explain the role of message brokers, introduce Kinesis and conclude with a worked example based on Twitter data. Argument Message Brokers Message brokers act…

Creating an amazing space for audience participation! — At the BBC, we put audiences at the heart of everything we do, so it’s important they feel they have a safe space to interact with all of our online products. …

A System Design Demonstration — Audience This article is the next in my series of how I would design popular applications. It is recommended (although not entirely necessary) to read the previous posts I’ve helpfully compiled in a list here. …

🎶 I love to go a-wandering, a knapsack on my back 🎶 — Audience This article is aimed at engineers with a reasonable understanding of algorithms but who are looking to learn about the knapsack problem. The examples will be written in Java, so a superficial understanding will be useful, but even without it you should be able to muddle through. We will also…

Gimme, Gimme, Gimme — Audience This article is aimed at engineers with a reasonably good understanding of programming, data structures and algorithms. It is mainly based in Java, so an understanding of the language is very useful. However, as long as you appreciate its core concepts you should be fine. Argument Greedy algorithms are used in…

Processing infinite data sets — Audience This article is aimed at engineers with a basic understanding of when we may want to collect and analyse large amounts of data. You don’t necessarily need hands on experience of designing such systems, but will need an appreciation of when these sorts of problems occur. Argument Let’s begin with why…

Storing your data! — Audience This article is aimed at developers looking to explore the difference between relational and non-relational data stores. It is aimed at people with at least a fleeting understanding of the differences already, and looks to expand on those themes. If you’ve never encountered either paradigm then I would do a…